Memories from 103.9 KIND Radio

Well, tonight I just found out that an old friend of mine died. His name was "Pappy". When I met him he was forty years old, but he already looked about seventy three. That's what a hard life will do to you. We met at a party. I was talking to him late at night. I got up to take a wiz. I could hear him muttering to himself from a distance. When I got back he was still talking about the same thing as if someone had been there listening to him all along. I used to perform all the time on his show on 103.9 KIND radio, the former pirate radio station of San Marcos, TX. So as a tribute to Pappy, I'm starting a blog about my favorite times at KIND radio.

Remember Rusty:

I'll start off with a memory from Pappy's show. A local San Martian named Rusty had just been killed in a drug raid by the police. They knocked down his door and shot him, because he was brandishing a weapon to protect himself. It was a very bad scene. Pappy asked me to write a song about it and come play on his show. I am personally against the war on drugs, especially when it kills someone who only sold pot. I think marijuana should be legal. So I wrote a song and played a protest show during Pappy's time slot. At the end of the song about Rusty Pappy was crying, and he asked me, "Why do you always write songs that make me cry?" And as I remember that now, I am crying too.

About KIND Radio:

KIND Radio was a pirate radio station that existed in San Marcos, TX from 1997 until 1999. We broadcasted from a tool-shed connected to Joe Ptack's house. He would stick his head in through a little hooded hole in the wall to make comments or tell us to shut up. DJ's paid dues to host two hour slots that ran 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. It was an experiment in free speech and free enterprise. Unfortunately that experiment failed in 1999 when the FCC forced KIND Radio and many other pirate radio stations around the country to stop broadcasting.

The Sesky Brisket Juice Show:

That was the name of my show. I started up sometime in 1998 or 99. My spot started off from 1:00 am to 3:00 am, but was extended to 1-7 am, because nobody else wanted those spots and I was usually awake at that time anyway. So I actually had to switch from a loose anything goes format all night long to a wake-your-ass-up-and-get-to-work focused format for the last hour or so when I would have much rather passed out because I was tired and wasted. Lots of crazy shit happened on that show. Most of the rest of these stories will be about my show on KIND radio.

My First Show:

My friends decided they didn't want to do their show anymore so I took their spot. Their spot was Wednesday from 1-3. I spent almost the entire show playing "Caress Me Down" by Sublime on a loop. My friends and I sang along really loud every time. People would call up and actually cheer us on for some reason. I guess late night radio listeners like to be annoyed. I am addicted to that song by the way. One time I fell asleep on a couch in my friend's garage with that song on repeat in the stereo. That spawned the "Caress Me Down" night on KIND Radio. I hadn't heard the song in a few days and once I started playing it I couldn't get enough.

My Second Show:

It was my first actual solo show after the "Caress Me Down" interlude with the previous hosts. I wasn't sure what to do, so I decided to bring no music except for the tapes that I owned. Any time you bring music which is in an outdated format to an event , the results are almost guaranteed to be embarrassing. These were tapes that I had collected while in middle school. I played Tiffany, Paula Abdul, Def Leppard and the Top Gun Soundtrack to name a few. My friend Cindy kept telling me I was totally gay. I mean, I knew all of the words to "Playing with the Boys" from the Top Gun Soundtrack. Damn. This caused me to think about my youth. Back at that age I was in love with airplanes. My favorite movies were Top Gun and Iron Eagle. I never even thought about Top Gun as a gay movie. I just thought of it as a movie about airplanes and competition and hot blonde girls. I didn't know I was watching gay porn. Time is a crafty sculptor of perception.

Cricket Season:

Once per year San Marcos is infested with crickets. Texas State University has an annual Cricket Fest to commemorate the yearly plague. One of those little bastards jumped into my studio at about 2 in the morning. He skipped under the table that held the CD player and started playing his cricket song. I decided to make him my co-host so I took the second microphone and put it on the ground next to him. From then on the constant chirp of his legs rubbing together provided background noise to my show. I couldn't actually hear it because there were no monitors in the room, so I was in ignorant bliss. Suddenly my door flung open and my neighbor came stomping into the room. My neighbor was actually a security guard at the San Marcos Outlet Mall (which is one of the top tourist spots in Texas) but he frequently ignored his job and drove to the KIND Radio studio to hang out with me. Well, there he was with a crazed look in his eye. "Where is it?" he asked as he started moving furniture around in the studio. He saw the microphone on the ground and wiggled the CD player table. As soon as the cricket jumped out he stomped on it. "That thing was driving me crazy!" he shouted. "Dude! You just killed my co-host!" I yelled back.

Go Go Godzilla:

I always started off my show by playing "Godzilla" by the Blue Oyster Cult.

Rolling With Brisket:

Right before my show there was a show called "Rolling with Dough". It was a show where rappers would freestyle and they ALWAYS ran late and cut into my show. It got to where I would push my way through the crowd of rappers, shove my CD into the cd changer and press play on "Godzilla" to let them know it was time to stop. One night I pushed my way into the shed with my Blue Oyster Cult CD, and one of the hosts said, "Hey man, I got some friends in from out of town so we gonna go long." I said, "You guys go long every night. It's time for my show so it's time to wrap it up." He said, "We're gonna go long tonight," again and then he stood up straight and folded his arms and two of his friends stood in beside him and folded their arms as well. All three of them outweighed me by about double and there were about fifty of their friends in the studio and the yard, so I had no choice but to back down and wait for them to finish.

All of their friends that had arrived in cars had the show cranked on their car stereos. It was a noisy scene. And then, over an hour after my show was supposed to start, they finally quit and came over to me and said, "Hey man, studio's yours."

So I stormed in and locked the door. Then, knowing that all of them had the show turned up to 11 on their stereo systems, I started waving the microphone in front of the monitor speakers causing crazy feedback on the signal. I did that for about two or three minutes. This caused them to turn off their radios and leave. Yay. I was so pissed I didn't even play "Godzilla". I put in a rap song and started calling my show "Rolling with Brisket". I played another couple of really annoying songs, and then fans of my show started showing up at the studio. As they tried to calm me down the phone rang.

It was a representitive from ARBITRON. ARBITRON is a company that does radio ratings and media research. She asked me, "What is the name of your show?" because she was confused by the name change I had made that night. I wouldn't say anything so one of the other people in the studio took the mic and said, "It's called Sesky Brisket". I took the mic back from him and said, "It's called the Sesky Brisket Juice Show. What is Arbitron?" She said, "We keep track of ratings for radio shows." I was pretty skeptical so I asked,"Okay, what's my demographic?" "Mostly boys between the ages of 13 and 17," she replied. I asked her a couple more questions about my show which she answered matter-of-factly with more very specific details. Apparently my show was doing well enough for these people to start keeping track of me. Suddenly I'm thinking, "Wow, wait a second maybe this is a real person," so naturally I said, "Well, okay, have a great night," and then I hung up and started talking tons of shit about ARBITRON. I made a few jokes about how ARBITRON must be one of the new Transformers toys, and then I played a tape of songs I had recorded from the Transformers animated movie. I really don't remember much after that, because I was so pissed off about the "Rolling with Dough" debacle that I got totally shit-canned.